Sunday, August 15, 2010

Execution Watch: Peter Cantu, Aug. 17

Peter Cantu

By Elizabeth Stein

Producer, Execution Watch

Texas plans to kill Peter Cantu Tuesday by lethal injection -- the 16th execution this year in the nation's busiest death chamber. Execution Watch will provide live reports from outside the building, along with a discussion of the issues and an interview with the author of Capital Punishment on Trial, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian David Oshinsky.

RADIO PROGRAM PREVIEW

EXECUTION WATCH

Aug. 17, 2010, Tues., 6-7 pm Central Time

Listen on KPFT's HD2 channel, 90.1 FM Houston, or …

Go to www.executionwatch. org at 6 p.m. CT, click on “Listen.”

SCHEDULED TO BE EXECUTED

PETER CANTU, 35, was one of several teens convicted of raping and killing two Houston girls in 1993. Cantu and four companions received death sentences. Two have been executed; two had their sentences commuted to life after the U.S. Supreme Court barred the death penalty for those under 18 at the time of their crimes. The slayings led to a Texas law allowing victims' families to view the execution of murderers. International controversy erupted around the 2008 execution of co-defendant José Medellín when it was revealed he was not notified of his right to meet with Mexican consular officials after his arrest. (More at www.executionwatch.org > Backpage on Peter Anthony Cantu.)

SHOW LINEUP

Host: RAY HILL is an ex-convict who has lost many friends to the death chamber. His civil rights activism has included shepherding several cases to the U.S. Supreme Court. Ray also hosts the Prison Show, now in its 31st year, www.theprisonshow. org .

Legal Analyst: JIM SKELTON, a retired attorney, contributes to the profession by teaching a weekly continuing education class in appellate law. He has worked as a prosecutor and as a defense attorney in capital cases.

Featured Interview: DAVID M. OSHINSKY, a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian, holds the Jack S. Blanton Chair in History at the University of Texas at Austin and is the Jacob K. Javits visiting Professor at New York University. He recently published Capital Punishment on Trial: Furman v. Georgia and the Death Penalty in Modern America. Oshinsky's other books include Polio: An American History, which won a Pulitzer in 2006, and Worse than Slavery: Parchman Farm and the Ordeal of Jim Crow Justice, winner of the Robert F. Kennedy Book Prize. (More on his latest book at www.kansaspress.ku.edu).

Reporter, Death House, Huntsville: DENNIS LONGMIRE, professor in the College of Criminal Justice at Sam Houston State University, Huntsville, and longtime activist against the death penalty (www.cjcenter.org).

Reporter, Vigil, Houston: DAVE ATWOOD, board member and founder of the Texas Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty, and author of Detour to Death Row. (www.tcadp.org).